The primary goal of this Project was to produce an open-source
implementation of the seventh edition of the Java SE Platform, as
defined by JSR 336 in the
Java Community Process.

JDK 7 reached General Availability on 28 July 2011.
Production-ready binary distributions based on the JDK 7 code
base are available now from Oracle
and will be available soon in most Linux
distributions and from Oracle's Java SE
licensees.

Detailed information on the main features of the release can be
found on the features page. The JDK 7
development schedule was divided into a sequence of milestone cycles. A complete calendar of the entire development timeline is also
available.

History

After Oracle acquired Sun we replanned JDK 7 according to the
"Plan B" proposal in
order to accelerate its release while maintaining performance and
quality. Features that needed more time to mature were deferred to
JDK 8 or later releases as explained here. A handful of
small, high-impact features which were not previously part of the
plan but were finished, or nearly so, were added to the
release.

The high-level schedule for the endgame of the release was as
follows: